Senior ministers believe Keir Starmer will not intervene to give the assisted dying bill further time in the next session of parliament as he is wary of opening up new divisions among Labour MPs.
The bill, which was passed by the Commons, is now certain to be blocked in the House of Lords without ever reaching a vote because of the large number of amendments its opponents have tabled and debated.
MPs who spoke to the Guardian said they had been “radicalised” in favour of a serious overhaul of the House of Lords because of the way the bill had been in effect killed off by a handful of peers who oppose it, many of them former Tory MPs, including Thérèse Coffey and Mark Harper.
Opponents have argued that the number of amendments – more than 1,200 – has been necessary because of the bill’s flaws that could put vulnerable people at risk.
The Scottish parliament voted down a similar bill on Tuesday night by 69 votes to 57.
The bill for England and Wales, which would have given terminally ill people the right to end their lives, is now expected to run out of time to pass on 24 April, its last scheduled day of debate before the end of this parliamentary session.
The private member’s bill’s sponsors, the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater and the Labour peer Charles Falconer, have said they hope to use the Parliament Act to bypass the House of Lords in the next session of parliament.
That would require Starmer to allocate some government time to the bill, or supporters to win another slot in the private members’ bill ballot to table the bill again.
Starmer is personally supportive of assisted dying and is angry with the conduct of the House of Lords in blocking the bill.
But some of the bill’s most vocal advocates in parliament have said they do not believe there is any hope of the prime minister choosing to give time to the bill, because of the divisions it would reignite within Labour.
“We are in a very different place to when this bill was introduced,” said one senior minister supportive of the bill. “I cannot see any appetite to relitigate it.”
Another minister said: “Keir will not give it time – it is not his personality, it is not his instinct and he does not have the political capital. The best thing we can all do now is to pile into the next private member’s bill ballot.
“He has been hoping process will sort it out for him. And the next bit of the process he will hope will sort it out will be the private member’s bill ballot at the next session. If that doesn’t work, it’s dead I’m afraid.”
A third minister said: “It feels like No 10 just wants it all to go away, and it’s probably fair to say that a sizeable chunk of supporters of the bill don’t really have much appetite left for a ‘rematch’. I’ve heard people talking about a royal commission, but honestly what’s the point when there’ll always be a cabal in the Lords ready to sabotage?”
Several MPs said the last time the bill had been raised with Starmer at private meetings of the parliamentary Labour party (PLP), there had been audible groans in the room.
“I think people are very nervous about picking over the old wounds, which are actually at the root of a lot of upset and resentment in the PLP – and where the alliances were forged which have led to a lot of rebellions, including on welfare,” one MP said.
More than 100 Labour MPs have written to Starmer asking him to intervene to save the bill, making the case that it is a politically popular issue and that Starmer has a genuinely personal moral stance that he could espouse.
“I think they are very distracted with everything else going on … Iran etc,” one of its authors said. “But the letter is trying to make the case for why this matters politically. But I’m not sure if it’ll make a big difference really inside No 10.”
Several of the MPs who signed the letter said they were hoping to speak personally to Starmer when he hosted his latest reception at his country retreat of Chequers, to try to get him to spell out his thinking.
Others said they were seeking an urgent meeting with No 10 to clarify what Starmer would do. Others have made representations to Starmer’s co-chief of staff Vidhya Alakeson and his political secretary, Amy Richards. Two MPs said they believed Alakeson was sceptical of allowing the use of any government time for the bill.
There are also some recriminations among supporters over how the bill was steered through the Lords. One minister said they believed Leadbeater and her backers were not sufficiently prepared for how the Lords would block the bill.
“Many of us asked for what the plan would be if the Lords blocked it and they didn’t seem to have one,” they said. “They believed that peers would play fair and that there would be some amendments but that it would play out according to convention. Well, that’s been a catastrophic misjudgment on their part.”
One peer said they had been advised against speaking in favour of the bill because it would eat up time that was needed.
“I am not sure in retrospect if that was the right call, because it has given the misleading impression that the house is against the bill when that is not the case,” they said. “We were advised not to speak and to let the bill progress. But now it has not progressed and we have not been able to argue for it.”
Many MPs are committed to trying to reintroduce the bill in the next session of parliament via a private member’s bill. Falconer has told MPs that with the number of supporters there are in the Commons, he has calculated there is a 95% likelihood of the bill’s supporters coming in the top five places.
But some casual supporters of the bill may balk at the levels of public scrutiny that steering the bill again through the Commons would attract.
Some of the bill’s backers said they now wanted to focus their energies on wholesale changes to the Lords. Two of the bill’s high-profile supporters, Labour’s Simon Opher and the Conservatives’ Kit Malthouse, have formed a new all-party parliamentary group on reform of the House of Lords.
“After the hereditaries have gone, we should come for the rest of them,” one MP said. Another said: “This has absolutely radicalised me. We need major constitutional reform; we saw it with hereditary peers, with employment rights but this is the most egregious. It has turned many us into diehard advocates for Lords reform.”
One of the ministers said: “The fury towards the Lords is off the charts. Absolutely outrageous and deeply damaging, whatever your view on assisted dying.”
